Introduction

Several foundational elements required to achieve Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a semantic web are in place and available to the materials community. The semantic web, sometimes referred to as the web-of-data, focuses on ontologies as well as the linking data for machine-to-machine data interchange (implemented via RDF and OWL). Linkage between multiple datasets, files and their respective metadata can be established in an ad hoc fashion without having to adhere to specific database table structures. Linked data without context is of limited value. A semantic web for materials requires common vocabularies. An example of a common vocabulary is the Dublin Core (DC) ontology, a set of universally accepted metadata used to describe a resource (e.g. document).

The table of contents listed above provides a subset of Material Science and Engineering vocabulary, listed alphabetically, and indexed under A through Z.